


Superstar

by halotolerant



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers Generation One
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alt Modes, Alt-Mode Sexual Interfacing, Alternate Universe, Art School, Bigotry & Prejudice, Chirolinguistics, Dinosaurs, Energy Field Sexual Interfacing, Mental Health Issues, Other, Seekers, Slow Burn, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-07 23:46:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14092368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: “My next semester’s project,” Starscream found himself saying slowly to Megatron and thus also the assembled crowd, “is a study. An in-depth piece of great insight and social awareness.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings** : It's hard to tag a story about mechanoids correctly/adequately. I've tried to cover the bases. 'Mental health' is a bit different when you're running code, but thematically it's there. 
> 
> **Notes** :  
> So very much Avoliot's fault ♥ Many thanks due to my wonderful beta elfwhistletree. 
> 
> (joor = hour, cycle = day, the rest should become clear)
> 
> This fic is **complete** and will update at least daily as I do final edits

“So.” Astrotrain took a slurp of his drink and tilted his head to the side, still studying. “It’s, like…. about transformation?”

 

Starscream took a moment to remind himself that if he shouted, all the mechs gathered towards the other end of this chilly, stinking, stupid, so-called ‘gallery’ might turn around and stare at him.

 

Which was, yes, technically speaking, the aim of this whole endeavour but not for it to happen _like that._

 

He kept the tone of his reply, therefore, as moderate as any reasonable being could, given a confrontation with such rank stupidity.

 

“Obviously not! It obviously is not about that. How much more obvious could it be?”

 

“But you made a giant model of a transformation cog? I mean, kind of. Made of, um…” Astrotrain, drink in hand, reached out and made a sort of circling gesture in the air. A few drops of carbonated engex flew through the air, barely missing the installation, and spattered onto the floor in black streaks.

 

Not that it made much difference to the floor’s general state; this building was an old industrial unit, as far as Starscream could tell, besmirched with a million years of manual toil from back when the campus had mostly been a Quintesson hover-pod slave factory. Truly it was insulting to even ask a mech of Starscream’s calibre to step pede in such surroundings, usual venue or not.

 

Now, he made himself cycle through an intake and an exhaust before speaking again. “I made this cog from the _used tabs of_ _engex cans_? I know there isn’t such intellectual rigour for you lot over in vehicle design and 3D printing, but do I have to spell it out?”

 

“Uh. No. Sure, I get it. Um.” Astrotrain raised his hand and picked at something in his intake valve – _disgusting_ , triple-changers were just disgusting, three modes and no manners. “So…”

 

“Yes?” Starscream had turned away, once again adjusting the little plaque about halfway up the wall above his installation. He’d not been sure whether to credit his alt mode – knowing he was a seeker would help people see the grace inherent in his work, of course, but at that point they might just start to be jealous of the sheer number of talents he’d been created with, to the extent of acting against him, because mechs could be petty like that.

 

Soon, very soon, the crowd of opening night guests for the freshman first semester show would move from the other end of the gallery and over here, to see Starscream’s display. Then they would regret the waste of time elsewhere, presuming of course that they weren’t doing so already – that droning voice! And for so _long_!

 

“So,” Astrotrain continued slowly, “do you, like, know Megatron well, or…?”

 

Starscream turned around abruptly. There was a crash.

 

Hand to his mouth, Starscream let his eyes widen. “Oh my, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to knock you over with my wingblade at all. What a terrible, unexpected accident.”

 

Some across the gallery were definitely turning now, distracted, a rising babble of concern drowning out the dross no one could have avoided hearing before.

 

And then that stopped, and even Megatron was looking over from his stupid little raised podium thing over the crowds gathered about him, halted mid-flow. And not before time! Submitting yourself – and your live poetry – as an art installation was horrendously vain and crass and stupid and besides if it had been Starscream’s project he wouldn’t have made the error of going cheap on the lectern lighting.

 

Mechs were crossing the pitted floor now, coming to cluster nearer Starscream’s work and talk in muted tones. Given the necessity of having to kneel down and look like he cared about Astrotrain’s undoubtedly very minor injuries, Starscream was not able to read their faces as closely as he would have liked.

 

“Is it a part of your installation to cause your viewers physical pain? That seems almost insightful.”

 

Starscream realised too late that his position meant he had to crane his neck up to look at Megatron’s face. Strategic error.

 

“If you will excuse me,” he said frostily, “I am attempting to help my friend. If you wish to view my piece you are welcome. I’m sure the queue will move along in time.”

 

“It’s a transformation cog made out of engex can tabs.” Said Megatron. Which was not of course inaccurate, but it was the way he said it. Not like he didn’t understand but like it somehow wasn’t impressive.

 

The crowd of mechs seemed thicker now, and the tone of the muttering had changed. Somewhere, someone laughed.

 

Starscream joined in. He chuckled with a mixture of world-weariness - as befitting genius surrounded by those unblessed with vision – and gentle indulgence of those poor sparks.

 

“Oh, you misunderstand completely. But then it is quite… subtle.”

 

There was a silence. Starscream stayed kneeling at Astrotrain’s side, quietly demagnetizing the other mech’s field to prevent him getting up at the wrong moment, hiding that under solicitous strokes of his arm.

 

Megatron cracked first.

 

“Very well, explain it to us then.”

 

Smirking, Starscream waved his hand at the cog. Which had taken joors and joors to finish, and he would have liked to see Megatron do better. “Oh yes, this. This is merely a placeholder. No, this just indicates the focus of my next semester’s grand, over-arching project which I have already embarked upon, and which will be unlike anything ever seen before at the institute.”

 

Megatron folded his arms. “Oh yes?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Starscream was going to think of something utterly fabulous in the next few astroseconds. He could hear the whirring of his fans as his processors strained with it, but no one else would perceive that over the whispering all around them.

 

He was going to say something quite entirely amazing, because he was a brilliant mech who was never without poise. He definitely did not want to just transform and blast through the rickety roof and into the nice, clear, cold sky and away. Or at least, not any more than usual.

 

Megatron tilted his head to the side. “And that project is… a secret?”

 

“No, of course not.” Starscream looked at the cog. Transformation. Transformation. What did that make him think of?

 

-

 

The Iacon Institute of the Arts had long been step three on Starscream’s five-point-plan to achieving his life’s goals.

 

One: Win the Luna-Cybertron circuit in the record fastest time for a non-space alt.

 

(No one cared about space alts winning anyway, that was obvious and boring and besides they were people like Astrotrain or Omega Supreme: mech most likely to start recharging without anyone noticing a change in his conversational abilities)

 

Two: Graduation from the Cybertron Academy of Sciences

 

(This was still a given for a seeker if they could demonstrate contribution to a major research project, like say for example volunteering themselves for aerodynamic experiments to discover how you became the fastest Luna-Cybertron racer of all time)

 

Three: Fame, success and artistic recognition commence at the Iacon Institute, progressing to becoming the first freshman to win the Alpha Trion award, major exhibition commissioned before end of final term

 

Four: During period of immense success and fame, eventually permit suitably deserving, appreciative and financially worthy mech to become conjunx endura

 

Five: Extremely large gold palace.

 

In his various notation files, there was plenty more detail to the final set of steps, or there had been. You didn’t get anywhere without a flight plan.

 

One and Two had been accomplished more or less on schedule and to plan, after all. Winning that race had taken a lot of practice and training and a careful diet of exactly the right blends of energon, and some very tricky sabotage at the right time to the right mechs, but Starscream had of course been equal to it. The Academy of Sciences was rather boring after that; he’d even thought of actually turning in some assignments.

 

That was where he’d first met Astrotrain, who one of the professors had insisted on calling ‘your fellow volunteer’ as though Starscream had anything in common with someone who changed so many ways that sooner or later you saw _everything_ …

 

Getting into Iacon had been only moderately challenging; for his application piece, Starscream had ended up sending in the body casts they’d done of him in alt mode at the Academy during the form studies. OK, so he’d not actually produced the things, but they were of _him_ – how much more artistic could something be? He was a seeker. He was, by definition, the best a bot could be.

 

The rebellion against the Quintesson dictatorship had been vorns and vorns past when Starscream had been one of the last seekers to roll off the production line, built to ancient blueprints for the creators’ chosen elite class amongst mechs. It had taken a while after the revolution for experiments to start with form and function – after the heavy losses of the fighting, just getting more mechs into the world had apparently been everyone’s priority, and the factories were all set up for the forms they’d been turning out for millions upon millions of years. Now there were experiments, adjustments, even… _alternative_ methods of bringing new sentience into the world, and laws about how everyone was equal, their potential the same.

 

But if you turned on a holo-novel to see the romantic hero of the cycle claim his conjunx, or looked for the most popular form chosen in the mod-clinics? Seekers. Always seekers. Every time.

 

Sure enough, Starscream had been accepted to Iacon Institute in the first round of applications and had moved into the campus dormitory accommodation soon after with almost a pang of happiness. And there weren’t any other seekers at the Institute to cramp his style; all that admiration, all that covert and not-so-covert interest when he walked across campus the first time, that was for him.

 

Probably half of them had never actually seen a seeker in person before, poor things. After all, he was one, he had to go to decennial batch recalls for those stupid – completely unnecessary - checks, and he’d only met five others in his life. Two of whom weren’t around anymore.

 

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that almost from the first at the Institute, there had also been… niggles.

 

His dormitory, for example, was distinctly mixed. At the Cybertron Academy of Sciences, which had existed even during the Quintessence, where there was therefore something like an understanding of _tradition_ , seekers still had their own floor, and naturally the highest one. Admittedly, given how few seekers there were now, other mechs had been let in for reasons of space, but they were solely elite vehicle-changers, or one or two pieces of high-grade equipment like radar arrays or telescopes.

 

Whereas here, full of their ‘modern founding principles’, here they assigned rooms based no obviously logical or proper system at all, and Starscream’s corridor included a datastick, something related to waste compaction and – this was what had sent Starscream to the administrator’s office, incensed – a mech with a _beast mode._

 

“He walks around as his alt! All the time!” Starscream had brought up the images from his personal recordings, shoving them across the administrator’s desk. “This stupid alien animal that went extinct before he even came off the production line!”

 

Except it was worse than that. Of course it was, because Starscream was the most oppressed mech in all of Cybertron and Primus was just fancying another laugh.

 

“Me Grimlock not produced,” Starscream had been told, when he’d repeated his opinions, powerlessly, at his erstwhile floormate, having been ushered from the administrator’s office with a haste that did not bespeak an organisation cognisant of the grace of his presence.

 

“What? What are you trying to say?” It was hard to follow a mech when he was talking to you through the jagged mouth of… of that thing. Having an alt mode with a face was arguably even more trashy than being a triple changer – that was even an argument Starscream had had, once, in some bar somewhere.

 

“Me Grimlock not produced. Me Grimlock sparked.”

 

“Augh!” Starscream had said – the datastick idiot could later be heard through the walls replaying the noise all the time and it was not at all amusing, no one should be allowed to just _record_ their social betters – and retreated to his room.

 

None of it, Starscream had told himself, mattered. So what if the Institute had been slow to recognise his brilliance? That was the lot of genius, the burden of the truly gifted. As he had told Astrotrain, who was still his main companion - admittedly also not of the class he would have chosen to associate with, but it seemed a lot of the others were intimidated by Starscream’s exotic brilliance, and there hadn’t been many invitations hitting his inbox yet.

 

Sure, it was the new age of equality, but you didn’t see any statues in the city without wingblades on their backs. Heroes looked like him. Mechs were always going to need to idolise someone. Starscream’s cycle was surely just about to dawn.

 

Instead, it had been barely cycles later that Megatron had arrived.

 

Oh boohoo, late to start term because his old mining friend had been dying of early-onset cybercrosis, what kind of excuse was that?

 

But suddenly everyone was talking about functions and classes like the first chapter of a social awareness textbook and walking around telling each other loudly how they’d always regarded themselves as low grade equipment, or how most of their best friends were.

 

Like being constructed cold to be a large industrial drill and getting bored and tired and then writing some nonsense about how you’d never seen the moon was _hard._ Poems were just words, producing words wasn’t hard, wasn’t art in the slightest. It didn’t count and shouldn’t have been allowed. Megatron should never have been allowed to matriculate, if he couldn’t be bothered to arrive on time.

 

But here Megatron was, and here was his poetry, and here were all the scholars fawning over him, even after deca-cycles had passed, even now at the end of semester show. Which was supposed to have been Starscream’s opportunity to win them all back, to make sure that when it came time for the Alpha Trion Award next term everyone knew it belonged to him.

 

Anything was better than letting Megatron take that from him. He couldn’t lose. It didn’t even bear thinking about.

 

-

 

“My next semester’s project,” Starscream found himself saying slowly to Megatron and thus also the assembled crowd, “is a study. An in-depth piece of great insight and social awareness.”

 

“You don’t have to listen to this, Megatron.” Some skinny mech, mostly purple, with – with horns? What was this institute coming to? – had walked up and laid his claws on Megatron’s arm. He cast Starscream a brief glance with the same sort of expression he might have used for turbofox waste. “He’s babbling.”

 

“A study,” Starscream continued loudly, icily, “of a very rare kind of mech. A beast mode transformer who was sparked, not constructed or forged. A mech entirely new, never thought of during the Quintessence, never designed by their mighty intelligence but a product of the… mutual investment of mech progenitors. It is a disquisition on the meaning of what it truly is to transform oneself.”

 

“I thought you said this wasn’t about transformation?” Astrotrain piped up, from the floor. Starscream shifted backwards an inch to step on his hand.

 

“ _You_ are doing a project on _Grimlock_?” Megatron almost shouted, which also effectively covered the noise Astrotrain made.

 

“Me Grimlock!” said a voice from the back of the crowd. There was the sound of a cog at work, and suddenly that fanged head was leering down from about a metre above most of the crowd, jaws wide.

 

“Yes, well.” Starscream turned around. Internal systems were sending him lots of messages with alert signifiers. Lots of messages. Several deeply buried primal subroutines wanted him to transform, break through the crowd, punch that hole in the roof and not stop till he’d hit the next galaxy along.

 

But he was used to those, and stronger than them. Long, slow intake. Slow, careful vent.

 

“I have to go now,” he said, almost certainly maintaining a tone of detached ease and debonair calm although he couldn’t quite hear himself over the roar of his processor fans. “I have to take my poor friend to the medibay. Come on, Astrotrain.”

 

-

 

“The progenitors of me Grimlock both medics.” Grimlock explained.

 

“Yes I can see how that would make you more adept at dragging a large partially-transformed train to a bed.” Starscream stood back and let out a long whirr of exhaust. “Why did you start changing, Astro, you idiot?”

 

“I was in pain! Trains don’t have hands!”

 

“Him Astrotrain is right.” Grimlock pointed out helpfully.

 

At this point the campus doctor came over and kicked them out of the medibay, and astroseconds later Starscream found himself in the corridor, acutely aware that even in mech mode Grimlock was maybe, possibly, just a micron taller than him.

 

You could still see the little beast-arms, even now. You could see them right there on his back. Of course you could see wheels on most mechs and Starscream’s wings were always with him but… _little beast-arms._

 

“Well,” Starscream cleared his intake. “Your assistance is appreciated. I can obviously lift much more than Astrotrain’s weight on my own, but it’s not good for my aerodynamic plating to take any strain and of course I never know when my legions of fans might call upon me to race again.”

 

“Me Grimlock come to medibay with train because have question. You Starscream talk about me. With Megatron.”

 

“Yes! Um. How much of that did you hear?”

 

“That is why question. Not hear much. Me Grimlock not listening very hard. Megatron poems make want to recharge. Very boring.”

 

“Oh really? Ah, yes, well, of course.” Starscream went through an intake/exhaust cycle, and allowed himself to smile.

 

Of course his plan had been a good idea, even if it hadn’t felt like a good one at the time. He was so incredibly intelligent that he could outthink even himself.

 

Yes it would be boring – with likely interludes of deep distaste – to have to spend much time around this mech. But when Starscream had described the project, frantically inventing as he went along, Megatron had looked… surprised? Impressed? And this was the sort of stuff the prize board did tend to love – underprivileged mechs put on the metaphorical podium, Megatron’s sort of rust, except that Starscream would be making real art, not a lot of nonsense about the scent of anthracite being like the blood of the underclass.

 

And any actual, real life podiums, prizes and awards would all be coming up Starscream…

 

“Grimlock,” he said, and held out his hand. “Would you like to come with me for a carbon bar and a chat?”

 

-

 

They were making their way back to the dorm, having picked up the carbon bars along the way from the small campus shop.

 

Other mechs were looking at them but that was acceptable. Starscream was an openminded and innovative artist and he naturally hung out with characters like Grimlock. People might have had him pigeonholed as the sort of bigot who thought beast mode alts belonged out of sight and out of mind, unless you were in the filthiest kind of video streams, but that had been a misunderstanding on their part of his true classiness and character.

 

He turned at an unmistakable chugging noise to his side.

 

“Ugh! Wait! What are you doing? Why would you shift in the middle of… we’re right out in public!”

 

“Carbon taste better in this mouth!” Grimlock’s.... other face, the toothy one, protested. It wasn’t plated in the right kind of material for much movement but somehow a lot of expression came through those little eyes.

 

“It’s not….” Starscream looked around, hissing as quietly as he could. “It’s not polite.”

 

“Why?”

 

Starscream clenched his fists. “Did your progenitors never teach you _anything_ about society?”

 

“Everything OK here, fellas?”

 

Starscream turned round, and then looked up at the mech approaching. Tall. Square. Red, white and blue.

 

Campus volunteer police without a doubt. Perhaps the same idiot who’d got all offended when Starscream had made the perfectly reasonable request that seeker-only washracks be created, to ensure contamination with inferior fuels from the lower grade of mech was prevented.

 

Starscream squared his shoulders, but before he could speak Grimlock was waving… a tiny arm.

 

“Yes OK everything. Starscream is doing insight and subtle project about Me Grimlock. Interview me.”

 

“Starscream? This Starscream?”

 

There was no need for the cop to sound quite so surprised. This was the problem. People didn’t understand Starscream at all. He was so underappreciated in his own time, but that was the lot of so many greats. When the time came for the documentary of his many achievements, he would have to remind them to mention that.

 

“Yes! Him Starscream. Me Grimlock.”

 

“Well, Grimlock, my name is Orion Pax. If you get any problems at any point – with any mech - you just look me up on the comm system, OK?”

 

“Yes, well, if you’re done here.” Starscream put his hand on Grimlock’s side, remembered too late that Grimlock was still in alt, remembered not to recoil from that in front of Pax, and compromised with an astrosecond’s worth of pat. “If you’ll excuse us, we have art to make.”

 

-

 

Back in the dorm, Starscream led the way to the communal area at the end of their corridor of personal quarters, opposite the door to the – equally communal, it was so inappropriate – washracks.

 

Every couple of cycles, cleaning up, soaping, oiling, changing his brake fluid, Starscream could only wince with distaste when he thought of all the others who had stood where he did, shedding flakes of their inferior alloys and cheap paint.

 

Grimlock switched back to mech mode before sitting down on one of the big sofas. Evidently he had at least figured out that it was easier for him to use furniture when he had the kind of body shape for which the furniture had been designed.

 

Of course one of the advantages of this nascent project was that Starscream had every right to indulge his curiosity. That interfering datastick couldn’t claim he was ‘interrogating vulnerable bots’ this time!

 

“Going back to the subject of alt modes, what advice did your, erm, your progenitors give you about mode transformation?”

 

Grimlock shrugged, and opened a carbon bar, shoving the whole thing in his mouth at once. “Usual teaching. How to change. How know when cog tired, ought to replace. You Starscream not told this?” he added, sounding vaguely concerned. “Have to ask me?”

 

Unprepared for the question, Starscream found himself casting his memory back – the production line, supervisors, except - coming up short with a sudden, nauseating error chain when the suppressing sub-routine he’d programmed kicked in.

 

“No! But the way you go about it, it’s like… like you’re living in your alt mode!”

 

You got some downloads of that kind of thing of course. You couldn’t avoid it. You could be searching for something perfectly innocent and it would come up and you had accessed the files before you could do anything about it. Ordinary looking mechs interfacing with mechs in alt mode, _wires going everywhere_ , or two in alt mode, ports accessible in all the wrong places, shifted about, thigh ports near intake valves.

 

Just like, for random example, the way Grimlock’s arms were positioned when he was in mech mode, they had to be so sensitive in the alt. But there they were, just out in the open, all the time, reaching…

 

“Which is alt mode?”

 

Starscream stared at him. Primus, maybe this mech had even lower processing power than he’d guessed. “Um. What you turn into?”

 

“When me Grimlock mech, me Grimlock turn into dino. When me Grimlock dino, me Grimlock turn into mech. Which is alt?”

 

“But…”

 

“What Starscream’s alt mode?”

 

He drew himself up a little. “I’m a seeker!” How slow, not to even recognise his shape! “I am a jet, naturally.”

 

Grimlock barely even blinked. “But jet not you?”

 

Starscream stared at him. “I wouldn’t eat carbon bars as a jet!”

 

“Jet cannot. No mouth, only intake. Dino and mech better build combo than jet and mech. But Starscream is very handsome so no need to be jealous.”

 

“Jealous? Of…? I am a seeker. A seeker! What would I... Wait, did you say handsome?”

 

Grimlock shrugged.

 

Letting out a long vent, Starscream sat back on the sofa and cracked open an engex can. He wasn’t sure why he felt like he hadn’t carried his point, when clearly he’d been right.

 

“What is your project for next semester?” he asked, feeling generous enough to indulge whatever nonsense the answer would be.

 

Grimlock beamed. “Me Grimlock painting dinos. Many dinos. Were big dinos, small dinos, flying dinos, dinos with three horns, dinos with two horns, dinos with horns on back, dinos like Me Grimlock, swimming dinos, dinos…”

 

“Yes! Yes, thank you, you make it quite clear.”

 

“Me Grimlock show Starscream.” And he was standing up off the sofa – not transforming at least, thank goodness – and walking towards the door of his room.

 

Starscream would have bet money on Grimlock living in something more like a nest than ordinary bot quarters. But the room Grimlock beckoned him into was almost pristinely clean, a recharge slab gleaming with polish, a neat shelf of various fuel supplies, small spare parts and tools, and in the corner a glowing ferrofluid lamp.

 

Not unlike Starscream’s room. Not that he indulged silly things like lamps, he wasn’t afraid of the dark, seekers had stunningly acute vision in the infrared spectrum.

 

Except then, on one wall, there were a whole series of framed paintings of alien organics – dinosaurs, presumably, though Starscream hadn’t exactly ever had time to study the variations of an extinct species on a stupid, damp muddy planet, millions of light years away. In fact he knew the collective name mostly because of opinion pieces and letters about beast mode alts in some of the more conservative newsfeeds, which were the ones he tended to read because they were the ones campaigning for things like separate seeker washracks and preservation of top floor privileges.

 

Grimlock’s dino pictures were… surprisingly not awful. If you liked that kind of thing.

 

“Did you make this too? Sculpture?” Starscream stepped a bit closer to one of the framed things, different, all black rock and weirdly textured.

 

“No, that bones. Dino bones. T-Rex. Me Grimlock like T-Rex.” And there was that noise, that unmistakable chugging noise as Grimlock changed to make his point.

 

Starscream winced, grinding his gears together in an effort not to make a comment.

 

“Bone?”

 

“Bone turned into rock. Petrify. Old, old bone, this happens. Progenitor Wheeljack tell Me Grimlock so.”

 

Starscream looked at the display again. Bone. Rock. Organic and inorganic, the transition between the two… he’d need to order the bone from off-world of course, but it had to be out there. Organics died all the time, someone had to be making a profit on what was left behind.

-

 


	2. Chapter 2

Obtaining bone and writing a program to get one of the 3D printers to produce a sculpture of Grimlock– with just enough margin for error to look like he’d used a handheld laser – was even easier than Starscream had expected, and only occupied some of the vacation break.

 

The dorms had emptied out, which was pleasant. No need to have to wait for the washracks to be empty, no risk of coming back to find a whole group of mechs in the communal area who might solicit his presence to add sparkle and wit to their dull evenings.

 

Starscream had even had time to do some proper research into ‘dinosaurs’. This, he’d learnt, was a fairly useless collective term to cover thousands of different beasts that had evolved on the Sol 3 planet around the same time that the Quintesson’s planet full of robot-slaves were first reaching sentience. As Grimlock had said, these beasts had been really quite impressive, adapting to terrestrial, aquatic and avian environments, dominating their planet for tens of millions of years.

 

In fact, when Grimlock arrived back from vacation early – something about his progenitors going to a conference off-world, there were details, Starscream didn’t really care – it wasn’t even that annoying to have him in the dorm. Because Grimlock, obviously, was also interested in dinosaurs and so that meant there was someone to instruct who cared to listen.

 

“And this often gets missed in the datafeeds, but they are not actually extinct, either, properly speaking.” Starscream pointed out. It was now the first decacycle of the new semester, they were in Grimlock’s room, and he was photoimaging Grimlock in his dino mode, ready to upload the data to the 3D printer.

 

Not that Grimlock knew about that part of it - as far as Grimlock was concerned Starscream was doing all this the labour-intensive way; taking the images, studying them, carving by hand like some sort of primitive service drone. Maintaining this illusion was why Starscream had had to go to Grimlock’s room every several cycles for a while now for this kind of imaging, when it would have been much more efficient to stick him in the printer’s scanner compartment, capture every possible piece of info to be able to recreate any desired pose, and have done with it, and with Grimlock.

 

It was a huge chore, obviously, and an encroachment on Starscream’s personal time, but seekers weren’t defeated by minor obstacles.

 

“In fact, the avian dinosaur lineage known as ‘birds’ survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event,” Starscream continued. “They are still very common on the Sol 3 planet. OK, now bend a little to the left and stretch your limbs out. I want more of an action shot.”

 

He wasn’t sure why Grimlock wasn’t more excited by the bird news, until when he got back to his own room and found three text uploads pending on his inbox, from Grimlock, including _Flying Dinosaur! The Story of Birds_ , which had been translated from some Sol 3 language. ‘Picture good,’ Grimlock had written as a tagged comment ‘But birds exciting dinos not, You Starscream read others first.’

 

Which was ridiculous, because obviously anything that could _fly_ was much more exciting and interesting than anything stuck lumbering on land. And Starscream felt he ought to go and tell Grimlock this at once – he was helping a less enlightened mech towards better understanding, that was just part of his amazing social awareness and giving attitude. Yes, he could have sent a message back instead but no mere datafeed would have the clarity and brilliance of his own, in-person argument.

 

It took about a joor to upload the photoimage data safely to the printer feed, during which Starscream read some of ‘ _Flying Dinosaurs!_ ’ – admittedly these beasts were annoying small, but the principle of the sheer awesomeness of flight was still true – and began to wonder if Grimlock had ever even been flying. If he didn’t understand the brilliance partly because he’d never experienced it.

 

That set off a rather weird chain of associated thoughts, ideas that seemed only astroseconds after his processors had spawned them to be incompatible with his base programming. And, yet, present.

 

Images uploaded, he straightened himself and went to exit his quarters, already looking forward to the argument shortly to come.

 

They’d had some good arguments – discussions, debates, frank exchanges of views (throwing drinks at each other had only happened twice) – over the project so far. Grimlock was actually a much more complex thinker than his speech processor issues would lead one to believe. (What had those been progenitors been thinking, leaving him like that? And them both medics!) He probably wasn’t as intelligent as Starscream, obviously, but that could be said of any non-seeker mech, and he had opinions about many things, including a dislike of poetry which it was frankly delightful to hear him hold forth on, give or take the frustrations around his use of adverbs.

 

Grimlock’s progenitors hadn’t favoured strength over higher processing, it seemed, only over any appearance of it. To them, evidently, what their offspring could actually do was more important than what he could appear to do.

  
It was entirely bizarre.

 

But whatever the progenitors had been thinking in concealing it, they had built Grimlock to be able to hold up one end of pretty interesting discussions. Not like that dolt Astrotrain, or smug Megatron, always ending everything with ‘but being a seeker you wouldn’t understand’, or Megatron’s stupid purple horned friend who never said anything at all and just loomed at you when you’d made a perfectly civil enquiry.

 

So this evening they could discuss birds, and eventually this time maybe Grimlock would concede that Starscream was right – after all, Starscream was always right really – and then they could eat some carbon bars (Starscream had found a place that actually sold the original coal flavoured ones, Grimlock was going to be so excited) and maybe watch a feed – there were several ones from Sol 3 about dinosaurs, it turned out.

 

Starscream was humming the theme tune from one of them as he closed his door behind him.

 

Out in the corridor though, he stopped.

 

There was a strange figure in his view. An unfamiliar mech who was letting himself out of Grimlock’s room, moving just a tad unsteadily as he did so. Some big, stupid-looking bot who probably changed into landscaping machinery and bent steel bars to try and pick up dates because that was the extent of his repartee.

 

It wasn’t like Big’n’Chunky was sneaking out with his ports still actually _open_ but he might as well have been - you could see streaks of fluid and lube all round the hatch seams, it wasn’t exactly _subtle._ And that was besides the streaks of grey, yellow and red paint rub-off on his thighs. He was moving like every joint in him had been freshly oiled, like his tank was pumped full of the richest engex, like he was on the verge of relaxing so much he’d just recharge on the floor. You could tell exactly what they had been up to in there.

 

And that was…. that was…. not acceptable in a shared living space! It was rude and inappropriate and… and not a good example to the other mechs, at all, the datastick was a minibot, you had to be careful around them, Starscream had been reading an article just the other cycle about how their tiny brain processors were highly impressionable!

 

Filled with entirely justifiable moral outrage on behalf of the entire community of corridor B67, processors heating with anger, with righteous anger, Starscream turned on his heel and went back into his room.

 

It took him a long time to fall into recharge. For some reason his processors kept trying to model whether or not the yellow paint streaks were in the same alignment as the little beast arms. It was disgusting. So disgusting it made him overheated and tense and absolutely ruined his rest.

 

And it didn’t stop there.

 

Starscream had obviously been trying to avoid his corridormates as much as possible up until this point in the semester, but once you started looking and watching and using recording devices placed strategically in the corridor ceiling, you could see that Grimlock was getting a new mech in his room on a semi-regular basis. Big mechs and minibots and every function imaginable (although they always arrived and left in mech form, so presumably Grimlock also… obviously he wasn’t… no mech would put up with that kind of perversion, obviously)

 

What all the bots also had in common was that they walked out of Grimlock’s room looking like they’d had the servicing of a lifetime.

 

It was deeply… annoying. Even on his flights, transformed and soaring, Starscream found himself thinking it over again and again. Sometimes, towards the end of his allocated time, he’d find the edge of it, the beginning of forgetting, of letting the jet just _run_ … but the alerts, the patch code kicked in, and then it would be time to stop, still unable to shake any of it.

 

It was deeply, deeply annoying for reasons of taste and manners, and… and because Starscream, as a mech of discretion and dedication to his craft, knew that true artists needed to put their art first. Having all these hangers-on could only hamper Grimlock’s achievements and - more importantly - Starscream’s, because Starscream needed access to Grimlock whenever inspiration struck, that was key the project, and if Grimlock had the sense Prime gave a turbofox he’d understand that.

 

What Starscream didn’t understand, no matter how long he thought it over, was how Grimlock was managing to get all this attention. It was Grimlock after all! Maybe ‘ugly’ was too strong a word but not by much, not unless you really liked brute strength to the exclusion of everything else (and there were those little arms! In plain view! Did mechs not see that?)

 

He could have asked Grimlock what his trick was. For the project, it would have made perfect sense to ask Grimlock. It would have been background research. But asking outright presented several problems – it would mean acting like he was surprised, which he was but even Grimlock might work out to be offended by that. And it would mean acting like he cared, which he definitely did not.

 

Besides the whole issue of outraging public decency, of course, which was definitely not acceptable at all.

 

He had to assume that many of Grimlock’s… assignations got arranged through his personal comm feed. There were several programs you could install that put you in a shared server with other interested parties. But as far as Starscream knew – and he was pretty sure after he’d been through a few of the different platforms, searching unsuccessfully for Grimlock’s profile – they depended on the kind of interactions you needed language skills to succeed at. More language skills than Grimlock had ever been given.

 

The breakthrough came during Starscream’s second review of all the monitoring footage he’d got from the corridor camera (before that irritating datastick had noticed it and had it removed – the upload feed was totally encrypted and untraceable in terms of having been placed by Starscream, he wasn’t an idiot, but really if he’d know how important it was going to be he’d have added some redundancies and paid for something with better signal cloaking).

 

But even from the footage he had, he could see that on a regular basis, every several cycles the same time that Starscream usually allowed himself his decacyclic long flight, everyone else in the corridor had obviously known he’d object and had planned to exclude him, they were all absolutely pit-spitting rust-heads), a large group of other mechs traipsed into B67 and mostly into the room of the waste compactor, from which came lights and sounds suggestive of… mass cavorting. Every now and again someone - or more than one – would spill into the corridor itself, usually holding a cup of engex and still dancing.

 

Grimlock was part of these parties. And a very simple analysis showed that of the seventeen mechs who’d come to his room in the time Starscream had been observing, eleven had attended at least one of the two most recent gatherings.

 

-

 

“You Starscream not images Me Grimlock since nineteen cycles,” was Grimlock’s greeting to him, when Starscream walked, as nonchalantly as possible, into waste compactor’s next dorm party.

 

(“I thought you didn’t like these kinds of things. Our kinds of things,” the datastick had said, eyes narrowed.

 

“I didn’t know they were happening. In a public corridor. In contravention of 5 different sections of the rental code,” Starscream had explained.

 

“And yet here you are,” the datastick shot back. “You don’t even know my name, do you?”)

 

The music was already pretty loud. Starscream had to power up his vocal processors to answer Grimlock’s question.

 

“I’ve been busy sculpting! What about you? Busy? With anything?”

 

There was a pause, then Grimlock transformed back down into his mech mode, presumably to get his aural processors closer to the source of the sound.

 

Starscream realised he had started to stop registering whether he was presented with Grimlock in mech or dino mode when he first saw him. It was ‘Grimlock’ either way. That was one of the things about having an alt mode with a face. That was why it wasn’t OK.

 

He repeated his question nearer to Grimlock’s mech head.

 

“Me Grimlock paint,” was the answer, without hesitation. Which suggested that the frequency of… companionship, was nothing new, nothing Grimlock thought of as notable. “Me Grimlock watch _Land Before Time IX: Journey to Big Water_. You Starscream not there.”

 

One of Starscream’s fans started whirring. The room was far too crowded, much too warm.

 

“Well, also, I had to take a call from an associate from the Science Academy regarding some of our recent research. They still need me so much, it’s quite pathetic really. Actually this particular mech wanted me to be his conjunx endura, but of course I had to say no.”

 

“You Starscream think…”

 

But they were interrupted. It was the datastick, prodding at Grimlock’s leg.

 

“What happen Flash?”

 

“Grimlock! I was looking for you. That guy over there, Marslander? He’s the one who negotiated the shipping on the canvases I was telling you about. You want to ask him how he managed it, maybe it would solve your problems, get you the same discount.”

 

When Grimlock had moved away, ‘Flash’ was still there, arms folded.

 

“Something you want to say?” Starscream challenged.

 

Flash made a derogatory noise through his vent, and walked away, then paused, turned and tapped his face-mounted camera lens in a way that was clearly intended to be threatening.

 

It was a weird crowd, when Starscream took a moment to really look around. A big mix of minibots and normally sized, which you didn’t normally get, and quite a few had… visible construction issues. Starscream wouldn’t have dreamt of showing his face in public if he’d been stuck half transformed with wheels on his legs, in fact he’d probably have just jumped in a volcano, but then not everyone had his finer feelings. He moved to the table with the drinks, trying to ignore the pounding music.

 

Grimlock and Marslander were talking quite animatedly, but at a reasonable distance from each other. Starscream sipped his engex, winced – this was definitely not the expensive stuff – and, having once again ascertained that there was no one present worthy of his attention, leant back against the wall to watch whilst also running through his inbox feed, which was full of red alerts and deadlines as usual.

 

Obviously, these did not apply to a mech of his standing. To a seeker, one of the last few. And on the occasions when administrators forgot this, it usually only took a few comm-calls to the Science Academy to get someone to come down on them. That professor truly had wanted to be Starscream’s conjunx, and possibly maybe Starscream hadn’t fully explained that it was never going to happen, especially depending on how nicely the professor smoothed his way elsewhere.

 

At last, Marslander wandered away to go and dance with some mech with what looked like an actual _enamelling_ condition – it was disgusting, this was a disgusting room and Starscream was going to wash twice as soon as he was out – and Grimlock was left on his own.

 

Starscream pushed himself off the wall and stretched out his joints, rubbing away a spot of engex spoiling the gleam of his left wingblade, ready to walk over.

 

There was a mech who looked like a speedster crossing the room. In passing Grimlock, the mech actually bumped into him. _Idiot._ It wasn’t like Grimlock had even transformed again, he was still in mech mode and occupied relatively little space. Starscream prepared some choice comments about steering when your chassis was slung so low you might as well be a floor-polisher.

 

Grimlock, though, did not shout or bash the other mech, or even move away.

In fact, him and the other mech, they were…. They were holding hands now.

 

No, Starscream realised, they were _speaking hand._ Hand to hand communication, palm-to-palm signal exchange. Just staring at each other, intent, occasionally shifting the position of their fingers.

 

Chirolinguistics.

 

It had been an optional add-on at the Academy of Sciences, but only grudgingly – as if anyone smart enough to make it to the Academy wanted to waste their time with the way service bots talked. Usually the students learning it needed it for research, if their subjects tended to be from that class and they needed to interview them, for example.

 

“Yeah, it makes my plating crawl, sometimes,” Skywarp had agreed, when Starscream had asked him about it. “It’s not like it’s interfacing, but it’s too close to it, all that electromagnetism stuff, brushing fields... ugh. But the mechs they’ve handed me for volunteers? Half of them have minimal vocalizer programs, none of which include pain expressions. The other half have downloaded those stupid ‘vocal upgrades’ you see on billboards near the bargain marts, and so they sound like something out of high Cybertronian literature and I really don’t have time for that. Like, it hurts or it doesn’t, get over it.”

 

Skywarp had been a few years ahead and already on the fellowship track, the only other seeker Starscream had met during the whole Academy time. In an earlier version of Starscream’s five point plan for success, he’d assumed his conjunx would have to be a seeker too, and when he’d first met Skywarp he’d had some hopes of that. But Skywarp had been… Not that any seeker could be anything other than justified in anything they chose to do, obviously, but… His research really hadn’t ever sounded… Starscream hadn’t ever quite been comfortable that… Well anyway, it had been boring to listen to.

 

From the looks of things, whatever Grimlock and the speedster were managing to talk about, they were anything but bored. But maybe….

 

“Hi there. Not seen you around before.”

 

Starscream turned, startled by the voice.

 

“I don’t think we’ve met,” the mech continued. He was tall, solidly built but with the micro-articulations in his hands immediately obvious. A medic, probably, or designed to be one. The medics were the Quintesson-desgined model that persisted most commonly now, because even the lowest-memory service bot could figure why they were necessary. Whereas you needed _intelligence_ to appreciate seekers. But now that mechs weren’t being worked to collapse as a matter of course there wasn’t the call for medically trained staff that there had been, and the last several winners of the Alpha Trion Award here at the Institute had actually been medic or medic-allied; those hands could serve several purposes.

 

“Oh, I’m not staying,” Starscream said quickly. He looked back across the room. The speedster and Grimlock were no longer where they had been, either of them. No, they were half way to the door. Together. Still hand in hand.

 

(And with those little arms on Grimlock’s back – in his current mode – just open in the air. Could those hands speak? Did mechs ever try? Would he let them? Would he let this speedster, with his stupid giant spoiler and flashy red body paint?)

 

“Pretty bot like you?” the medic was saying. “Surely you can find something to keep you interested?”

 

On their way to the door, Grimlock and the speedster passed the datastick. The datastick gave some kind of salutation, grinning.

 

Then turned and looked dead at Starscream. And folded his arms. Smirking.

 

“…built for luxury, not this kind of smelting pot.” The medic gave a short laugh. “There’s equipment here that’s practically steam powered. Why, in the cohort where I was raised, they would _never_ …”

 

“I have to go.” Starscream said. He thrust his drinks cup into the hand the medic had been gesticulating with, halting the gracefully micro-engineered gestures in mid-air.

 

-

 

In Starscream’s studio, there were now twelve sculptures of Grimlock made of various types of bone.

 

Spat out by the 3D printer, designed to be 98.049% perfect.

 

Every one suddenly looked completely awful.

 

There were seven of the alt mode, five of the mech mode. That was partly because Grimlock liked the alt mode more – any suggestion he just moved between them was a lie, Grimlock felt happier in his alt, one figured that out soon enough, and the reason he’d never explained or justified himself, as far as Starscream could tell, was that he genuinely didn’t know there was anything wrong with that.

 

How could Grimlock’s progenitors not have told him so? How could they have thought it didn’t matter? The first time Starscream had ever booted up, the first time he’d ever opened his eyes, the inspector of the line had told him off for slouching – he’d not been used to balancing the wings yet, astroseconds into life. There were _standards,_ he’d learnt that right then, learnt what he was, what he was worth. And he’d gone to testify at that inspector’s trial, vorns later, defending him. Modern mechs seemed to think you had to coddle everyone, make it easy, protect freshly woken bots from truths that were just the same now as they had ever been.

 

Starscream went to the work box on his bench and got out the hand laser tool he’d been turning on intermittently and leaving out, to ensure the energy usage patterns looked convincing for the hand-sculpting cover story.

 

Then he threw open a packing crate and pulled out his last piece of organic matter. It was the bone of some creature they had on Sol 3 that was apparently highly numerous due to being cultivated for consumption, and the bone had come from a leg, thick and bleached white in being cleaned.

 

Stupid lumbering Grimlock and his stupid alt mode. Starscream switched on the laser tool, slashing forward in faster and faster rhythm. It was quite right to carve him from some docile, placid beast that a species as profoundly ridiculous as the apex mammal of Sol 3 could wrangle into walking to the slaughter whenever they wanted. Grimlock was a freak, an aberration, a poster child for why letting mechs spark with each other was one of the stupidest bits of civil rights mania since the first idiot had looked at all the stability and wealth and organization of the Quintesson empire and decided to rebel against it rather than suck it up and get on with it and appreciate his place in the grand scheme of things.

 

_The cage viewed,_

_without the door:_

_shining metal,_

_nothing more_

 

That was one of Megatron’s. People had a tendency to quote it when Starscream got on to the Quintessence era but what did Megatron know? He hadn’t been there either. The Quintessons might have chosen who lived and who died but they rewarded _effort_ , they didn’t leave mechs to struggle and survive as best they could regardless of their gifts. The Quintessons wouldn’t have left Megatron down a mine, if they knew his abilities, and they wouldn’t have left Starscream to have to make a path through the world alone, all alone, they’d have known his worth and they wouldn’t have let a _thing_ like Grimlock exist _at all_ and they…

 

“What did that poor animal ever do to you?”

 

With a roar, Starscream turned, almost jamming the hand laser into Orion Pax’s broad shoulders.

  
“Hey! Easy! I think it’s already dead, don’t you?” Pax gestured, and Starscream realised he was talking about the bone.

  
Which was, yes, mostly lumps and powder on the studio floor at this point, sliced and sliced and sliced into nothing.

 

“Keeper of the peace _and_ art critic?” Starscream shot back. He turned the laser off, suppressing his fan cycles even though he was hotter than he could remember being. Alerts all over his feed, and frag it but he needed to _fly,_ he was itching with the yearning. He wasn’t meant to keep reapplying and reapplying the suppressor patch but didn’t he know his own systems better than some idiot at the recall centre? “How are such talents leaving you in such a desperately demeaning job? Catch any serial parking offenders recently?”

 

“Maybe I like to solve mysteries.” Pax went over to the smashed remains of the twelve little models and crouched down. Starscream didn’t remember stamping on them, exactly, but it had to have been him, no one else had been in here. It was a Primecycle night, every bot on campus was partying somewhere or other, with someone or other...

 

“Cow, cow, sheep. That one’s actually synthetic resin, they had you there.” Pax waved a shard at Starscream, then reached down again and picked up another, bringing it closer to scan. “Cow. Not sure on this one, rarer mammal, I want to say badger?”

 

“I had permits to import all of those.”

 

“I know.” Pax raked over a few more fragments. Some were still recognizably Grimlock; that tail was unmistakable. The bits of mech mode, by contrast, could have been anyone. “I looked those permits over before I let the courier deliver to you. And so I also know how they much this stuff cost you, so I’m confused as to why they’re ruined like this.”

 

“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand the artistic process.”

 

“Perhaps not, but I can 3D print as well as the next bot, how do you think I make wheel clamps for those parking offenders of mine?”

 

Starscream drew himself up. “If you are implying…” He was ready with the outrage, but also tired. So tired. He wanted to fly, desperately, but suddenly he didn’t feel like he could even get in the air. Like someone had pumped him full of leaded sludge, like he’d been forcibly demagnetized.

 

Pax waved his hand at him, pushing the objection away. “Oh, calm down, I’m not in the academic side of regulation-keeping, that’s for the faculty, Primus help them. I’m more interested in how the students are doing.” Standing, he folded his arms and looked at Starscream, waiting.

  
The silence drew out. Alerts were arriving in Starscream’s feed with increasing frequency. It was getting harder and harder not to start moving, not to transform and _soar_ , as fast as he possibly could.

 

Finally, Pax let out a long, slow vent and relaxed his hands down against his thighs. “Will you at least promise you won’t actually burn this place down? Those hand lasers are a menace.”

 

Starscream shrugged. Undoing the central fixing on the hand laser and putting it back in its box was something to do, and seemed to satisfy Pax as an answer too.

 

Pax was almost at the door when he paused and turned back, all that wide expanse of him. It wasn’t a plating design Starscream had seen before, and he’d met a lot of bots.

 

“You know,” Pax was saying, “the original Quintesson forms really are some of the best.”

 

Starscream stared at him.

 

“They knew what they wanted in their mechs,” Pax continued. “Exactly what they wanted. Speed and agility, sometimes, or strength, or precision or intelligence, depending on the intended function. But above all of that came obedience. And how do you keep a mech obedient if you’ve built it to be the best it can be, so powerful that even its creator might have reason to fear?”

 

Starscream knew what was coming, more or less. It didn’t matter how deep you buried it, how aggressive you programmed the overwrites and overrides. It was always there.

 

“They wrote the need for their approval into every line of code,” Pax was continuing, “in ways we don’t even fully comprehend yet, and in those times, if a seeker…”

 

Suddenly it seemed less awful if he said it himself: “They made one hundred seekers every ten vorns,” Starscream burst out, interrupting. “And at the end of that time, they held a race, and everyone but the first ten to cross the line got torn apart and smelted down and recycled, I know, I heard, I have to go to recalls and _talk_ about it, but it doesn’t _matter_ , I wasn’t around then, that time is over.”

 

“Is it? Sometimes I remember it just fine.” Pax’s voice was low, Starscream wasn’t sure exactly what the emotion in it was.

  
That made sense, sort of. Pax’s build was so ridiculously large, it could very conceivably be a frame mod and they’d been outlawed in one of the revolution’s first legislations as ‘unacceptably damaging’, never to be made again, useful or not.

 

“I remember the last stand at the Gate of Justice,” Pax said, still quietly. “That’s the Gate of Primus now, but then… it meant something very different then. And the Quints had the seekers rallied round them, ordered to hold the line and preserve their masters’ evacuation or die trying. And we were broadcasting to them on every channel, telling them: _brothers, we’re free, join us, leave them, be free with us_. They were circling, circling, some in alt mode, some running their jets off their backs. And they never budged, even as the snipers picked them off. And finally when the Quintessons had their ships in orbit, safely on their way, they turned back and aimed their cannons and they took out every seeker left in flight. In case we used them to give chase. Because the seekers were the best mechs they’d ever designed.

 

“In that time,” Pax continued, after a short pause in which the whining of two sets of fans was all too audible, “if some mech had said to me there’d come a time when mechs vorns and vorns from being produced at that moment would look back and say it had been a golden age? For any of us? It wouldn’t even have been anger I’d have felt. It would have been pity.”

 

Starscream couldn’t hold his eye any more, after a while. He snapped closed the case for the hand laser and went to put it back up on the shelf. His hands were vibrating very slightly with the force of the whirring of his fans.

 

There was a creak from the door. Pax was actually leaving now, maybe, finally.

 

“I really thought you were starting to mix better, Starscream. I’ve not seen you alone on the tower roof in ages. The local flight hub actually checked in with me that you were OK, you’ve not buzzed their tower or messed up their radar in so long. But I guess you want to fly pretty badly right now - maybe go with that? Not for too long, just… let it out a bit. Sort your head a little. And if you want to talk, later, I’m always around.”

 

That was the last sound for a while, and when Starscream, shaking, finally turned to look, Pax wasn’t there anymore.

 

Every joint in him still felt like he’d been oiled with grit and slag. The alert messages were blaring, and as fast as the therapy program tried to mop them up and dump them they grew up again, and trying to ignore them only made them switch from yellow to orange to red. His fans were starting to ache with whirring and he was still too hot to think straight.

 

He did want to fly, desperately. Or to fight. Or both. Transform into his alt – his alt where things felt easier, seeker alts were _meant_ to be tempting to occupy, pleasant to inhabit, it made so much sense to have designed your weapons to _love_ to be at full, deadly functionality.

 

Transform into his alt and just run, skim through the clear, cold air until he couldn’t see anything but cloud, couldn’t intake anything but ozone and cosmic rays. Up in the clear air where the atmosphere and space blended, where there was nothing to run into, and nothing that could come after him.

 

And yet, intertwined with that, as little sense as it made, that old code he couldn’t shift, couldn’t shake; he deeply, desperately didn’t want to be alone.

 

-


	3. Chapter 3

The party in corridor B67 seemed, if anything, more lively than it had been when Starscream had stormed out some two joors earlier. There were even more bodies jammed into the tiny space of the waste compactor’s apartment, and a lot more empty cups and discarded filings pouches in the corridor.

 

Enough mechs, in fact, that Starscream didn’t think he recognised any of those in his immediate view.

 

The weariness which had been threatening to envelop him rose up again. Obviously he was usually extremely robust against fatigue due to his superior design, so clearly he’d fallen afoul of one of the freshman viruses that annually infiltrated even the safest feeds, because right now…

 

Even finishing the thought seemed unreasonably tiring.

 

He started to make his way through the seething sea of mechs and towards his room.

 

“Hey, pretty,” someone said to his left. “Glad you made it back.”

 

Starscream looked up. It was the medic-mode bot who’d been chatting him up earlier, carrying a drink and looking slightly glowy round the optics in a way suggesting he’d been having a good evening already.

 

Wanting Starscream, though, to make it even better. Naturally, because Starscream was the best, the finest, the handsomest catch on campus, and he could ‘mix’ with anyone he wanted to, anytime he liked.

 

Smirking, the medic pushed himself off the wall he’d been leaning on. “I’m Paramed, by the way. Fine textiles, second year.”

 

Starscream was duly impressed. That was a niche subject indeed, and certainly bespoke how well engineered those hands must be.

 

“Ambulance alt?”

 

Paramed frowned. “Emergency response motorbike. But I don’t think I’ve changed in the decade since my last physical.” He sounded confused, then smiled, face clearing. “But of course, you’re a seeker. Recommended minimum one-in-fourteen cycle frequency to prevent fatal runtime errors.” The last bit sounded straight out of a memorized text.

 

At that moment, there was the unmistakable chug of transformation from a way down the corridor. Starscream was not the only mech to turn and look as Grimlock emerged from his room, pede transforming to clawed foot in the motion of a single stride, a snub-snout head soaring into the air.

 

The speedster was still at his side. Seeing the alt, he put one hand to his mouth, apparently giggling. He was smaller, now, in comparison to Grimlock, and he leant slightly into Grimlock’s flank.

 

“WASHRACK FIGHT!” a bot yelled at that moment from the opposite direction, running down the corridor with two sponges already in hand. And then everyone, in eagerness or disapproval, was yelling.

 

“You want to get out of this?” Starscream asked Paramed, indicating the door to his own room.

 

“Sure thing, pretty,” Paramed told him. “After you.”

 

It was convenient, tremendously so. After all, Starscream had come back to the dorm feeling a need for company and here was a bot who was eminently suitable, even _eligible_ ; refined, classy, skilled and – Starscream rapidly established – not without some personal financial means in terms of mining concessions and offworld trading shares.

 

And it swiftly turned out that Paramed was no worse than the rest of the handful of mechs that Starscream had ever allowed to interface with him. It was never that much fun – Starscream didn’t get why there was so much fuss about it, when really when you got down to it the actual act was mostly a tangle of wires – someone’s always got twisted, somewhere – a series of mild shocks, a ripple of sensation and then a tedious exchange of code that usually had to be purged right after for being a totally pointless use of central memory.

 

Really, when you looked at it rationally and sensibly like a clear-headed bot with a perfect grasp on his own code (entirely in control of himself, a great deal more than the sum of his programming), the last chunk of the semester had merely been an aberration in Starscream’s onward progress, and now things were working out entirely for the best.

 

In the morning after the night before, lying on his recharge slab with Paramed still slumped next to him, Starscream stared at the ceiling and went through all the reasons why this was true, and then let himself close his eyes and pretend to fly.

 

-

 

Cutting his losses whilst there was still time to fix things, and giving up on the Grimlock project altogether might arguably have been the sensible and rational thing to do, Starscream could see that. And that was what Paramed wanted, undoubtedly. In fact Paramed wanted Starscream to move dorms and _get away from all of that, I’m not comfortable with you having to live cheek by jowl with that type._

 

“I notice you attended a party ‘that type’ hosted,” Starscream shot back before he really processed what he was saying.

 

“Everyone knows refits have the best meds to re-sell.” Paramed was picking at Starscream’s ports again, fingers working at the panels, not paying much attention. “All those weird medical conditions once you stop just recycling the production errors and let them live in the community instead? They get prescribed all sorts. But you actually _living_ here is totally different. Those shared washracks! And you a seeker! Don’t they understand how precious you are up at central office?”

 

“Well…” Starscream conceded, and after a moment, and enduring a bit more scrabbling, let the panel on his forearm swing open.

 

He waited until Paramed was plugged in and not really forming sentences – perhaps it was Starscream’s incredibly superior seeker processing that meant he didn’t get gormless in the way other mechs seemed to during this? – to say, “Nonetheless I have to stay here – I have certainly enquired about every possible opportunity for alternative arrangements and been assured that there aren’t any. And I have to finish the Grim… a project I’m doing about a beast mode alt, I can’t register something new now.”

 

At the time Paramed just grunted and nodded, still riding the charges presumably entering his wiring from Starscream’s ports. It was only later, when Paramed was just about to leave, that he frowned and said: “You’re doing a project on _what_?”

 

“Not important.” Starscream used a final grope to his ventral wiring to get him to the door.

 

Paramed wasn’t any worse than Starscream’s previous paramours, but talking to him was something somehow worse than boring. Funny how it left him feeling like he was running someone else’s script, standing outside of himself.

 

-

 

“Just fine, thank you,” Starscream said icily the following cycle passing Megatron on the quad.

 

“Good, good.” Megatron beamed nastily. “You must know, I am so looking forward to seeing the final masterpiece.” He himself was carrying several aluminium sheets, a paint pot and a small brush – too small, like it might be used for something like _writing giant poetry on aluminium sheets._

 

“Need a hand with that, buddy?” said a voice from somewhere behind Starscream. And, of course, it was the campus cop, needlessly perky as usual, because Starscream’s cycle could only get better at this point. “I’m a vehicle alt, if you need it. Oh, hey there, Starscream.”

 

Megatron’s face had passed through a series of reactions that Starscream was at first bemused by. The last of them was certainly disappointment. “You’re one of _Starscream’s_ friends?”

 

“I’m trying to be.” The cop stuck out a hand. “Orion Pax, pleased to meet you.”

 

“Pax?” Megatron said. Starscream had never heard that voice from him before. “You were at the Gate of Justice! I, uh…”

 

“You wrote a poem about it. I know.” Pax and Megatron were, somehow, still holding hands. Even though they were definitely doing the talking – and the not talking, and the staring – with their faces.

 

Starscream knew an opportunity to escape when he found one. It was probably too much to hope for that Megatron would get plug-struck enough to forget Starscream’s project, his own, the prize and/or how to form sentences, but perhaps worth a quick invocation to Primus all the same.

 

With a sense of wondering, too, although it wasn’t a question he expected to be answered, by Primus or anyone else, as to how any two mechs could just… how it could ever be quite that simple.

 

-

 

“You see, life can be very difficult, when one is a genius,” Starscream explained.

 

Grimlock was in beast alt, which meant he could only fix one eye on you at a time. Starscream had a suspicion the one not looking in his direction was watching the muted stream of _‘Walking with Dinosaurs: Live!’_ (which involved very primitive, non-sentient bots, unfortunately, not any live animals, but they’d already paid the shipping on it before discovering that).

  
Since, after all, Grimlock apparently didn’t rank Starscream in whatever mental list of ‘mechs worth going after’ he carried about with him.

 

Not that Starscream would have tolerated that, of course, that was so very much not the point. The point was the _neglect_ , frankly.

 

But, “Yes,’ Grimlock answered. “Progenitor of Me Grimlock, Ratchet, genius of medicine. Always out, very tired. In the Quint time, he come home late and Wheeljack and Me Grimlock help oil his hands. Million year-old hands, wear down too much now. Ratchet scared they slip, kill someone. Ratchet he says, enough killing now.”

 

“Um. Well. Yes.” Starscream nodded. He was never going to get used to the openness with which Grimlock discussed his life. A household of conjunxes and their offspring! It was like something off a diversity inclusion poster.

 

He had the rest of his carefully planned explanation to deliver, and it wasn’t too hard to segue back into it: “And it’s the same, you see, with my sculptures of you. Because they were too good! Too figurative, too representational. My skills are really somewhat phenomenal, and that’s not right for this module, because it’s abstract representation that they want, really - do you understand?”

 

Grimlock stared at him for a moment, then transformed into his mech mode before walking across the room to where Starscream was standing. They were more or less eye to eye now, and Grimlock met his gaze fully before speaking.

 

He was conscious, just, of the edge of Grimlock’s EM field. Not something he was used to registering in other mechs, but something he’d now come to associate with Paramed’s prods and pokes, or the lead up to them.

 

And he usually found those annoying, or slightly uncomfortable, which made what he was feeling now even more peculiar.

 

“Me Grimlock understand You Starscream is saying this.”

 

Starscream frowned, processing that.

 

“So you understand I need to start again? I’ve figured it all out – I’m going to record your transformation sound and make an installation out of that, together with some of the soundtrack from these dinosaur films. I think that will impress them – Sol 3 stuff, really avantgarde, really exotic.”

 

“Are You Starscream tired?” Grimlock was stepping even closer, as if Starscream hadn’t spoken at all. “Not recharging OK?”

 

The interfacing with Paramed was messing up his cycles, but Paramed hadn’t noticed and he spent much more time with Starscream – it was irritating that Grimlock could see it.

 

There was a certain signature about Grimlock’s energy that was unlike anyone else’s. Maybe because he’d been a sparkling, maybe because he transformed so much, but it was _bright_ , somehow, sizzling, vibrant.

 

Starscream consciously turned his fans off. Alerts were pinging through his feed, faster and faster. “This isn’t a project about me.”

 

“Friends are not project.”

 

“Friends?” Starscream took a step backwards. Terminated the fans twice more in quick succession. He wanted… it wasn’t quite like wanting to fly, it felt as desperate but it wasn’t… he wanted…

 

“Yes! Me Grimlock must need talk…” Grimlock shook his head, looking annoyed. “Words!” he said, with clear frustration, and let out a long exhaust vent.

 

Then, after a moment, he held out his hand. “You Starscream speak this?”

 

Starscream looked down at it. The digits, carefully articulated, slightly flexed inwards, the faint shimmer of EM haze – they said that was part of how chiro worked, static discharges, how it could feel intimate, even arousing – there were vids of that too, bots just _talking_ each other into a state of mutual…

 

“I don’t… I’m a seeker.”

 

A faint laugh. “Everyone know that. You Starscream tell. But seekers cannot learn?”

 

Starscream thought wildly, unwillingly of Skywarp. Skywarp’s experiments.

 

“Me Grimlock want speak better with You Starscream.”

 

Not entirely clear, what the sensations coursing through his plating were. Something almost like an ache. Something urgent. And yet he wasn’t afraid, not quite, or at least he was forgetting to be.

 

“Me Grimlock teach?” Grimlock’s hand was still extended. Starscream was aware to an excessive and unnecessary level of detail of precisely how far away it was, down to the nearest femtometre between them. Aware that he was moving, infinitesimally, and that gap was getting smaller.

 

“Can do,” Grimlock was saying, voice low. “Me Grimlock teach many mechs this. Not difficult.”

 

It felt like the time he’d been tricked into walking through the tunnel of a giant electromagnet, back in the Luna-Cybertron racing prep time, when it had been every bot for themselves. The same sudden, awful destabilization, the intense nausea.

 

“Well,” Starscream said, because he was a seeker, and seekers stayed poised no matter what you did to them, even when they weren’t sure what it was, quite, that had happened or what it was they were feeling, or why. “Well, I suppose some mechs are somewhat… _easy_ that way. Or a lot of mechs. A lot of mechs that you’ve met. And I know you’ve ‘met’ a lot.”

 

And then he was moving away, was cracking his seams, straightening his back as he put it to the door, ready to exit. He was going to speak calmly, authoritatively and without emotion, because he was in control of himself, always.

 

“We’re agreed then? I will come and record you a few times next decacycle, and then that will be the end, I can take it from there, we won’t need to interact any more after that. And then you’ll have time, all the time you need for your other… activities.”

 

“Starscream…” Grimlock said, and there was the sound of the cog as he shifted. Beast mode now – that was probably instinct, probably just because he clearly preferred to be the dinosaur, he couldn’t _know_ … And he came forward again, once more reaching out, except now… it was the dinosaur mode and so when he reached out his hands… when he…

 

“How _dare_ you?” someone shouted, and it was really only as Starscream recoiled from the noise that he realised he wasn’t the one who’d said it.

 

Paramed was standing behind him, in the doorway of Grimlock’s quarters, hands braced on the frame. Not a weapon alt but frag if one wouldn’t have thought so, just then.

 

“I didn’t mean…” Starscream began to protest, but Paramed was pushing past him.

 

“You dare to stand there like that?” Paramed shouted. He was nowhere near as tall as Grimlock when Grimlock was in his alt mode but it didn’t seem to put him off and Grimlock was certainly quailing back. “You think _my ‘_ facemate wants to see you like that, you disgusting creature? You think anyone wants to see it? You don’t touch him, do you understand you fragmented, half-brained idiot? He doesn’t want anything to do with you!”

 

For a moment there was no sound but the whirring of three sets of fans. Grimlock’s were stuttering, Starscream thought, until he realised it was his own.

 

Grimlock looked angry, if anything, which made no sense of the fact that he was retreating – unless he knew how much stronger he was than Paramed, unless he was keeping it under control even though Paramed was talking to him like…

 

“C’mon Star,” Paramed said, turning. His voice was still cold with disgust. “That’s it, I’m not letting you live here any more. Come with me now and we can tell the administrator’s we’ll apply for a conjunx permit to have you move into my place in the morning.”

 

“Conjunx..?” Starscream said, or meant to – he couldn’t quite vocalize the words, only think them, astonished. They’d never talked about that. They’d never talked about anything.

 

“You can stay in my room for now – actually, frag it, we’ll get a hotel, somewhere with a decent oilery.” Paramed was coming back towards him. “When you’ve recovered I’ll order us some takeaway and you can tell the administration here that you need this semester’s grades waived, explain about this creature assaulting you.”

 

Starscream stared. At Paramed, and over at Grimlock. Grimlock who wasn’t moving, wasn’t speaking, who was looking back at him like…

 

“I’m going to take care of everything,” Paramed continued. “You don’t need this qualification at all, really – forget the Insitute! Once you’re my conjunx you’ll never have to work anyhow. We’ll holiday soon and I can show you my holdings on Luna 3. Starscream?” He was close enough to sense now, the weird itchy sizzle of his EM twanging at Starscream’s plating. Starscream hadn’t meant to step backwards, it just happened.

 

“Are you listening to me, Starscream, hello? I’m saying you don’t need to worry about anything any more.”

 

This was not unlike the dialogues Starscream had run in his head, fantasizing his way through the five steps to his masterplan for happiness. So this moment had to be feeling like achievement. This had to meant that at any moment, the alerts in his head would have to stop, placated at last.

 

“It’s OK, Star, you never have to see this… this _beast_ again, come on.”

 

Starscream didn’t plan to transform, didn’t choose to. He didn’t have a logic chain to deal with whatever this emotion was, but obviously he’d come up with one, obviously he’d figure it out, elegantly and gracefully and…

 

But suddenly, somehow, he _was_ the jet, he was the _jet_ and things were easier, simpler, and there was only one imperative, clean, and he knew what to do with it.

 

Blasting through the roof hurt a little, not much. He was streamlined, he was powerful, he was _flying._ He was out in the air, skimming upwards, up and away, away, away, away.

-


	4. Chapter 4

Flying, still flying, onwards and onwards.

 

Internal monitors suggested enough energon left to keep going for another 289 joors until refuel. Enough for a long way, a long way away from it all. No mouth to taste it, not in this mode, but it did feel different, better, as it flowed through, pulsing along the lines, feeding, pushing.

 

He could go higher, faster, better than anyone. Cold atmosphere slicing over his plating, trying to slow him down but he rose through it anyway, up and up. It got thinner and he got faster and he was _winning._

 

Edge of space, touching the void, the vacuum. Fastest race by any non-space alt and he could have beaten them too, if he’d needed to. He could have done.

 

 _A seeker is only as strong as his last achievement_ – the Inspector at his production line, pacing, writing. No one had known, they said, what his history was, when he was allowed to keep supervising. It had taken a while after the revolution for confidence in the new regime to get high enough for accusations, arrests, revelations of what had really been going on before. But the Inspector had known, really known, about seekers, he’d been only one left who did. _A seeker’s worth is in his actions, his accomplishments. Success is expected, excellence is required. You will need to be more than perfect, you will need to be the very best of the best._ _In the old times 90% of you would be scrapped down, bear that in mind. Be proud. Because you have been designed to be supreme among mechanized life, second only to your masters, their chosen children. If they deem you worthy. If you’re good enough._

198 joors of energon. Flying at the speed of sound now, comfortable, engines engaged and thrumming, all systems green.

 

The Gate of Primus, below, over and over with each orbit. High enough to pick it up on scans as the sunrise breaks over Iacon in a band of light.

 

The Pyramid, the Pit, the Gate. The complex of housing that covered what had been the Great Smelter. Quintesson buildings, Quintesson stamps on the fabric of Cybertron, never really gone.

  
Seekers, medics, some of the service vehicles – all vestiges too. Fewer and fewer now.

 

 _When they come back, we have to be ready._ Bitstream, at one of the seeker recalls, whispering between sessions, beckoning one or two of them in, near, private. _They’ll come for us. They’ll need us with them when they retake this stupid planet. Then things will be good again for us, then these mechs will give us the respect we deserve._ And then one cycle Skywarp hadn’t been there any more – turned out the meetings were being recorded, it was seekers after all, everyone knew about seekers, or so the talking heads had said on the news, pointing at charts and blueprints and old recordings.

 

So Skywarp was in jail, and Starfire and Thunderstorm were gone – _unexpected fatal_ _systems error_ it said on the obituaries, but people knew all about that too: seeker design was too good for that, no seeker shut down unless that was how they wanted it to be.

 

116 joors of energon. Some notifications coming through the feed, but easy to dismiss, because the jet didn’t have to care about appointments or personal messages. Mission, just the mission, just obey.

 

Forward and forward and up and up. Approaching 170 kelvin and lower – surviving the race had needed special mods, rockets, pumps, extra antifreeze, had those been kept? Memory out of order, not important. Task, mission, keep going.

 

Memory.

 

 _Not allowed, before._ Grimlock had said. They’d been watching Jurassic Park, the talk had turned to reproduction, Starscream had been too embarrassed to know how to stop it. Embarrassed, fascinated, envious.

 

_Not allowed, be progenitors. Quintessons forbid. No one know even if can do. Progenitors of me Grimlock, Ratchet and Wheeljack, try and try. Collect supplies, wait and wait, ready to build. And then me, Grimlock. At beginning, secret. Quintessons still boss. Hide. Me Grimlock not understand, want to go outside. Progenitor Wheeljack say ‘Wait.’ Me Grimlock think my fault, not speak good, not good for outside. Progenitor Ratchet say ‘You are perfect. They are ones who wrong. That is why they come end.’_

Grimlock trying to speak, running out of words, and Starscream not knowing any to fill the silence, although he ran three complete dictionaries in astroseconds. Grimlock watching him, him watching Grimlock – watching for so long, because… not because it mattered… obviously…

67 joors remaining. Overwrite the patch code that was keeping self-preservation higher in the priority chain than the mission imperative.

 

19 joors of energon – losing too fast, ought to be more. A leak? Or the cold? But enough to keep moving. Old code protesting now, loss of functionality threatened, confirm necessary?

 

 _I’m going to take care of everything,_ Paramed had said. _I’m not letting you live here anymore. Don’t touch him, you disgusting creature._

 

Necessary to run, absolutely necessary, keep…

 

6 joors of energon, barely… alerts now… systems red… 5 joors…

 

No seeker shut down unless that was how they wanted it to be.

 

4 joors…

 

Proximity alarm, insistent. A spaceship, chasing, he had to… Winner takes all…

 

Not a spaceship. A train?

 

_Train?_

 

3 joors….

 

“No,” a voice was saying, somewhere, somehow. “No, go slowly with it or he’ll just flood. Establish the line with a low flow and guide him, we need to get him down.”

 

2 joors but he had to keep moving, he had to get out in _front_ of these others, he had to…

 

“There’s no point, he can’t hear you, just do it, just…”

 

Darkness.

 

-

 

“And yet nonetheless I find it all distinctly unlikely.”

 

“Come on now, didn’t I tell you he admired you really? That’s why he acted how he did.”

 

“Yes, well, your estimation of other mechs’ motivations, Orion, has always been generous to the point of incredulity.”

 

Starscream tried to sort through the messages in his feed, assure his systems he was quite aware of how awful he felt, get any sensor back besides audio even if it meant diverting energon from slowly recovering vital systems.

 

A blurry image of the room where he was lying began to form, staticky and indistinct.

 

He was on his back, arms at his sides, he… he was back in mech mode, now.

 

No wonder everything ached. The longer he spent as the jet, the worse it hurt to return to this shape afterwards, the worse the drop back to a mode where pain systems actually worked. Where he felt enough like himself to have to deal with whatever it was he was feeling.

 

“Well, regardless of why he was saying your name, he’s here now and he’s safe, that’s the point.”

 

Starscream knew that voice. Earnest. Serious.

 

“I think the point is that he’s in _our_ recharge unit, Orion, I think that’s the point.”

 

And that one.

 

“ _Megatron…”_ Starscream vented out, disgusted, and wondered if transformation now might mercifully knock him out again.

 

“See? He’s still saying it.” Pax, voice and shape moving towards him. “Hey, Starscream, you feeling able to sit up yet? I’ve got some carbon bars here for when you’re ready, taking some solid fuel along with the slow line drip might be a good idea, the medic says.”

 

“Medic? _Paramed?”_ Starscream did sit up, sudden rush of alerts and the urge, the need, to _get out._

 

“Hey, hey, steady there.” Pax’s hands on him, holding him back. “Stay with us. Stay right here, OK? Vent slow, with me, come on. In and out. In and out.”

 

“Is he here?”

 

“Paramed?” Pax’s face was starting to come into focus, all concern. Somehow beyond his shoulder Megatron’s shape, arms folded. “Uh, he’s not here right now. I mean, you’ve been gone a while, I’m sure he’s around somewhere, um, but I can…”

 

“No!” Starscream tried to move again, and this time another mech joined Pax in holding him down.

 

“Hey Starscream, buddy, relax, OK? I like literally just found you and it was really cold out there and I ran out of downloaded media a few cycles in.”

 

“’Train?” The visual focus finally came together properly, the systems adapting to the mech eyes rather than the jet’s scanners, and there he was: Astrotrain, every stupid purple inch of him, leaning with Pax over the recharge slab where Starscream was lying.

 

Starscream looked round, counting them off: Pax, Astrotrain and over there, still scowling, Megatron. They were in some private quarters somewhere, ones he didn’t recognise.

 

No one else present.

 

No one else with any reason to be there, of course.

 

From his body, an intake line connecting him to what looked like an oil/lube/anti-freeze mix, the kind you saw in hospitals.

 

“Train? You found me?”

 

“Flash helped,” Astrotrain stood back a little. “He got your trajectories off his security footage. But all the same, like, you go really, really fast. And you’re not built for prolonged exosphere time, dude, what was that about?”

 

“ _Flash_?”

 

“Maybe he just likes saying names,” Megatron murmured.

 

There was just enough energy in Starscream’s verbal array for a sentence now, and this was definitely worth the use of it: “Don’t worry yourself, Megatron, I wouldn’t expect you to understand the full complexity of the delicate process of establishing intel!”

 

Astrotrain stepped back with a snort. “Yeah, he’s fine.”

 

“Flash, Vend, ‘Pactor,” Pax said, staying where he was. “They were all helping us track you down. A whole bunch of bots were worried about you.”

 

Well. That made sense, really. Starscream was a seeker, after all. One of the last few. A valuable asset to mech society.

 

“And you kept saying ‘Megatron’,” Astrotrain explained. “So I wasn’t sure if we should bring you to him, except it turns out he’s totally gone all plug-happy and nesty and moved in with Orion anyway, so…”

 

Starscream found himself meeting Megatron’s eye over Pax’s shoulder with a brief, unexpected moment of entirely shared feeling.

 

“It’s probably best if you do stay here in my rooms for the next cycle or so,” Pax said now, standing back a little. “B67 is still getting repaired anyway so it’s not like you can go back there, and I want to keep an eye on your vitals.”

 

“Is…” Starscream vented, in and out. “Did any mechs get hurt? When I blasted? I do have tremendously powerful engines.”

 

For some reason Pax laughed for a moment. “No injuries that I know of, only the structural damage to the building. And to you. Powerful or not, neither of your modes was actually intended to punch through that many layers of reinforced concrete. Now, lie back down and I’ll get those bars for you to eat.”

 

Starscream looked around the room once more. Pax had a larger recharge room than the students got, and with an open door leading onto what appeared to be a private corridor – this was maybe actually a small apartment. There were several entertainment and news feeds projecting against one wall, and Astrotrain was lingering, looking curiously, apparently unaware of the intensity of dislike with which he was being side-eyed by Megatron.

 

Strange to think of them all, looking for him, finding him, bringing him here. Of course it made sense – seeker, valuable, rare – but somehow it was still rather surprising.

 

No Paramed – and even as the fear crested and broke, relieved, he was also aware that truly he hadn’t expected him.

 

Anyone would desire a seeker. But a seeker who broke down? A seeker who lost themselves?

 

And if there were anyone else Starscream might have thought might be here, certainly if a mech as unconnected to him as Flash had ended up involved, well that was just… he needed to repair. His logic board wasn’t fully functional yet. That was all.

 

It was getting more tiring to keep visuals online; Starscream found himself drifting back towards recharge.

 

Not sure how long it was later that he heard a voice he identified eventually as belonging to Flash himself. Again, it took a while to add visual to audio, trying to get central processing back and functioning from the soft haze of system repair.

 

Flash and…Astrotrain? It seemed like Astrotrain must not have got the hint to leave, which certainly fit his profile. The two mechs were talking, somewhere near the doorway, and it was possible to catch snatches which were nonetheless hard to analyse

 

_quite enough for him, don’t you think, you went to - well I can, I’m spaceworthy, that’s the point – the point is he would never do that for you – no, really don’t agree – at least come home with me for now?_

 

“You ready to try that solid fuel yet?” Pax was saying, and Starscream, startled, brought systems back online – much faster response now, almost imperceptible, although he couldn’t remember quite when he’d drifted off – and sat up again to take the cup from his hands.

 

He found only Pax and Megatron in the room with him. Megatron was leaning over a desk, writing, his **Audio Sensors Disengaged** warning light bright in the gathering darkness.

 

Starscream took a long sip, and then vented in and carefully out again.

 

“Train was looking for me?” he asked Pax, since Megatron couldn’t hear them.

 

“That whole time,” Pax said softly.

 

“What should I give him, then?”

 

Pax stared for a moment. “I think he just wanted you to be OK.”

 

Starscream ran over available data, programs, protocols. Despite rising fuel levels, his processor still felt sluggish. And when he tried to prioritise it so he could figure any of this out, then everything started _coming back_ , all the things he was trying not to think about, all the things that, really, all things considered, a seeker ought to have made a far better and more successful job of running away from.

 

“Who was looking for me, did you say?”

 

“Astrotrain, Flash, Vendor, ‘Pactor and Grind,” Pax frowned, counting on his fingers. “Harley and the guys in security. Your course professor. About ten of them in the support unit. And me and Megatron, of course.”

 

Starscream nodded, and took another slow sip of his drink.

 

-

 

Intermittent recharge blankness went on for about a cycle and a half, before Starscream found himself coming into consciousness feeling almost normal, and his processor systems were apparently in agreement and speedily dumped every single backlogged alert freshly into his feed, in case he had suddenly magically arrived at any solutions.

 

What was he going to _do_? What should he choose now? How could he even get up and off this slab when he had no idea, no idea at all how to fix anything?

 

Comprehensive answers to all those questions were obviously going to occur to him, but he wasn’t quite entirely sure – not just yet - how soon that would be happening.

 

Before he could quite finish working his way through to the fullest panic, Megatron walked in.

 

“If you can bring yourself to use our humble facilities, Starscream,” he said, voice heavily sarcastic, because obviously he thought he was just that funny, “then you might want to consider a washrack trip. You smell like someone who spent 16 cycles in their alt and then lay in a swoon for another 3. On my ‘facemate’s recharge slab. Where I had been planning to…”

 

“OK, OK, OK, point made, point taken!” Starscream swung his legs off the slab, finding that physically at least he felt better than he had in a while. “Shut up, for the love of Primus.” He cast a look back at the slab, which to a casual glance looked only as friction-marked as any other, but… “Wait, did you two already…? Here?”

 

“What do you think?”

 

“Augh!” Starscream jumped off it as fast as he could.

 

“Because if what you’re thinking, Starscream, is that I laid out Orion Pax on that very slab and pushed my fingers into…”

 

“I. Will. Wash. Now.” Starscream hissed. “If you’ve quite finished.”

 

“Well he certainly did,” Megatron said smugly, and admired his own fingers. “Three times.”

 

Almost running along the short corridor to Pax’s washrack, Starscream set to washing every inch of himself. Twice over. It was typical, just typical of a heavy machinery bot like Megatron not to have sufficient class to even… not to realise… not to think of….

 

Sponge in hand, Starscream paused.

 

All the alerts and queries in his head had silenced. Indignation had overridden every one.

 

That realization bought about half of them back at once. Not to mention a couple of new ones.

 

-

When, cleaned, oiled and dried, Starscream made his way back to the recharge room – as noisily as possible, just in case – he found Pax now standing there, commpad in hand.

 

“Ah, good morning, Starscream. Word just came through that repairs to your corridor have completed.”

 

“That means go away,” Megatron added from the corridor. “Also, breakfast is ready.”

 

Pax’s apartment had a little cooking/dining area too, it transpired, and soon the three of them were sitting round a table that was really only about the width of Pax’s huge chest, eating some kind of oil soup with steel shavings that was apparently complicated or something – anyway Pax cooed over Megatron the whole time they ate it and it was all entirely disgusting. Starscream would have been too sickened to eat if he hadn’t been so hungry and it hadn’t been so irritatingly delicious.

 

“I will be only too pleased to leave you, and this place, and never return,” Starscream assured Megatron, when they were mostly done, mopping up second helpings with bits of kerosene-flavoured carbon bar. “With regard to that plan, though, um…” He vented in, and out. Casual, cool and collected. Intel gathering, nothing more. Scoping the horizon. “Do you know if B67 are willing to have me back?”

 

Megatron laughed, and Starscream bristled. “Surely even you can understand, Megatron? They’ve seen my amazing abilities and they may feel that they are not worthy of my company in their corridor!”

 

Pax vented once and set his spoon down. “Why don’t you go and ask Grimlock if he wants to talk to you? He’s a pretty tentative guy, I don’t think he’s going to make the first move, no matter how long you wait.”

 

Starscream froze. Completely unwarranted! Where did Pax get off thinking he could… that it was OK to…

 

“He’s been visiting his progenitors during the repairs, but he’ll be back now too, you can talk here if you need to,” Pax added, then “What?” as there was a clang.

 

Megatron kicking him under the table. Had to be.

 

“Oh, you can wait another half cycle,” Pax said now, turning to look, voice all different… teasing? Ugh, it was definitely teasing, Starscream never, ever needed to hear that tone, ever. “I promise you, it’ll be worth your while.”

 

Starscream suppressed the urge to purge his tank. There was something about them, about the two of them _together_ that made him feel so… angry.

 

He spoke with was intended to be absolutely cutting chill. “I don’t know why you think someone like me would need to care, specifically, what any given other mech thinks of my behaviour.”

 

“Frankly, Starscream,” said Megatron, reaching for another bar, “I don’t know why Orion thinks that either.”

 

“I wasn’t talking to you. Perhaps you should make sure your audials are properly engaged?”

 

“I don’t suppose you care, then, that Paramed tried to have certain of your corridormates arrested, shortly after you, ahem, hit the roof?”

 

“What?” Starscream looked from Megatron to Pax and back again. “What? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have… it wasn’t his fault! Not at all! I’ll tell them so, anyone who asks! Who can I tell?”

 

Megatron started peeling the wrapping off a bar. “Not his fault? So you mean Flash didn’t film Paramed trying to get out of B67 without even calling the emergency services to let them know about your state of distress?”

 

“Flash?” Starscream closed his eyes for a moment. The volume of alerts in his feed suddenly halved.

 

“Yes, Flash.” Megatron was peeling the bar open so fragging calmly and Starscream wished beyond reason that the guns on his wingspan hadn’t been deactivated before his first booting. “Do not misunderstand me; Paramed may have wished to have any number of mechs on your corridor arrested, and I suppose he may have had his reasons. But when he auto-dialled law enforcement it was definitely something to do with removing footage from Flash. He may not have expected them to tell him that in Iacon, no mech’s data may be extracted without medical consent. But it’s hard to say; he suddenly remembered a pressing appointment on Luna 3, to which he has vanished ever since, so I suppose we may never know.”

 

Starscream was trying to vent. In and out. In and out. Slow. Steady.

 

“Megatron! That wasn’t very kind,” Pax said chidingly.

 

“Rather interesting, though.” Megatron sipped his drink, and gave Starscream a look he was not familiar with. “I hate to say it, Orion, but maybe you’re weren’t entirely wrong.”

 

“Do I get a prize?” Pax asked, and then it was all absolutely hideously soppy again for the remainder of the meal.

 

Starscream couldn’t wait to leave them. He wasn’t scared about seeing B67 again, or anyone in it. That would have been entirely foolish.

 

If Flash had arrived in time to record the aftermath, then at least some of what had happened had to be known. And Flash had never exactly liked him before, so if what Flash had discovered – what Flash might have been _told_ – had not been enough to stop him helping with the effort to track Starscream down, then maybe…

 

-

 

In the end, meeting Grimlock again wasn’t remotely complicated, because when Starscream walked to B67 to make enquiries there he was, snub nose to long spiky tail, lying on the communal sofa and watching a feed.

 

Starscream didn’t want to say his name. So hard to predict how Grimlock might change, when he looked up and saw Starscream’s face, and Starscream didn’t want to know the answer for certain.

 

At the same time, looking at Grimlock was something he wanted. Needed, perhaps. He hadn’t realised that was what that feeling was, that there had been that much of the urgency that was solely about this.

 

“Did anything get broken?” Starscream asked, finally, into the silence.

 

Grimlock was still the dino, and too far away for Starscream to really read his eyes. Getting up from the sofa at the first sound of Starscream’s voice, he’d seemed to start transforming for brief astroseconds, only to stop and revert a couple of twists in.

 

“Ceiling,” Grimlock told him, at last.

 

Starscream’s fans had started whirring.

 

One of the other mechs could leave their rooms and see them at any point – he hadn’t really thought of that. Or they might be lurking, listening. Laughing, more likely than not.

 

“What about your paintings?”

 

Grimlock was still staring at him.

 

Then Grimlock came forwards over the floor and this time he did shift, shrinking down until they were almost eye to eye, and yet Grimlock was looking at the ground.

 

“You Starscream fly so far,” he said, wondering. He sounded almost uncertain.

 

“Unfortunately, yes, I do have exceptional range. But Astrotrain found me! I didn’t mean to… I just lost it all. A bit.”

 

“They patch code? Help You Starscream? OK now?” Grimlock asked, suddenly blunt as ever.

 

For some minute fraction of an astrosecond, Starscream wanted to tell him. To talk about it. To say how he’d felt – how he still felt.

 

But what was the word for it? What was the word for any of this?

 

“Did I break anything?” Starscream asked him again. “In your room?”

 

Not that any of that stuff was probably actually valuable, as such, and obviously there were other paintings and other bones in the universe and probably more exciting ones, but it was one of the things that kept coming up in Starscream’s feeds and issues logs, over and over: whether or not any of those things had survived what he’d done.

 

“Nothing that matter,” Grimlock said. And again they were just staring at each other.

 

“I didn’t want Paramed to…” Starscream began, and then stopped because he still had no very clear idea what to say. Which was ridiculous because his vocabulary was probably a raise to the power one hundred larger than Grimlock’s but none of the words fit, not really. It was awful, so awful, whatever it was he felt, but what was it?

 

Rising, now, the wish to fly again. And yet when he thought of doing that, now – and ever since he’d woken at Pax’s - he thought too of that final, gasping, cold, desperate joor as his tank emptied, when he’d thought there was nothing ahead and no one behind. That still ached deep inside, like ice had got in and cracked something vital in an irretrievable way.

 

“Definitely OK?” Grimlock was closer, voice low. He looked so obviously worried now that his mech face was the one visible.

 

Perhaps Starscream had actually broken something? Perhaps the fossil? The gift?

 

What had Grimlock’s progenitors had to say about what had happened? It had occurred to Starscream, in all those enforced cycles of rest, that they had probably put as much effort into creating Grimlock as the Quintessons had into their designs, even the seekers themselves.

 

“Have help?” Grimlock insisted.

 

Starscream vented. “I’m supposed to go to the support unit to see someone. They got the seeker research trust involved or something, apparently they do want to offer me a new code patch. Naturally I’m fine – I don’t really need it. But I might oblige them with my presence in the interests of science.”

 

“No one always fine, Starscream.”

 

It was infuriating how little Grimlock understood about society. Infuriating. You couldn’t just say things like that, or where would everyone be? Where would excellence end up, if failure was acceptable?

 

“Seekers are.”

 

“Always supposed to be fine, seems like good way to make not be.” Grimlock shrugged and turned a little, indicating the table. “Me Grimlock got carbon bars, want one? Only anthracite flavour.”

 

After a little, ‘Pactor came out of his room and joined them on the sofa. He had a six pack of carbonated engex, and offered one to Starscream without a word beyond “This the episode where they have to make the shoes out of Styrofoam? I like that one.”

 

“I wouldn’t know about Earth media,” Starscream told him. But it was quite easy to stay, and the shoes thing was quite funny, actually. Shoes were funny. Humans were so stupid. A shame the dinosaurs had had to go away and let them have Sol 3.

 

He could have made this observation to Grimlock – he had a feeling Grimlock would appreciate its wisdom. But Grimlock was looking steadily at the screen, not him, and although he’d seemed welcoming enough, when he made a trip to the washracks and back, he replaced himself on the sofa so that ‘Pactor was between them.

 

-

 

“Have you thought about how this semester’s project will be achieved?” asked the therapist – Rong, it said on a little nameplate on his desk. He leant forward, steepling his fingers.

 

The temptation to jet up and smash out of this idiot’s office was at least 50% pure irritation, if not more. Certainly more that than alarm.

 

Because all medics on Cybertron were fools with egos twice the size of their memory chips, the code patches had been a rough ride. They’d said something about reducing his sense of what was expected of him – so that had been a fun two cycles of feeling unable to move from the sheer awfulness of everything, himself, his role in everything and maybe his lack of role in anything, simultaneously and nonsensically.

 

Not that he’d cared about how illogical it was until after, until after Flash, Astrotrain and Grimlock had dragged him out of the washrack – he’d been staring at the wall for three joors without turning the hose on, apparently – and down the medbay and yelled at some people, and he’d gotten an emergency uninstall and something else uploaded.

 

“Code written for seekers who not even tried to change for selves!” someone had been yelling. “Code for seekers not want new attitude – him Starscream try!” It was all a blur. Sometime after that he’d bust through a ceiling again, but Train, once more, brought him back.

 

The time with Rong was fragging annoying, but at least he felt in control of what his systems were doing.

 

“There are very arguable extenuating circumstances, if that’s an avenue you want to explore?” Rong’s tone was always this total neutral, like whatever you said was equally acceptable, which was clearly nonsense because that just wasn’t ever the case.

 

He’d cruised through the Science Academy on a technicality of course. But that had been fine, because… because he’d known he deserved to be there. Because of who – no, because of what he was.

 

“My project will be handed in on time, and will be most entirely fully adequate,” Starscream told him. They were working on ‘reasonable goal language’. Like everything else Rong did, said or was interested in, it was very stupid. You had to say the right things, not necessarily the true ones. That was coded in deeper than his wings.

 

-

 

‘Pactor and Flash were on the sofa in the communal area when Starscream got back to B67 from Rong’s office.

 

“Alright, Screamer? How’s it going?”

 

“He is a ridiculous excuse for a professional and I think his alt mode is _decorative_ ,” Starscream said, sinking down beside them with a long vent. “Er, except that obviously alt mode does not predict, explain or excuse the way a mech behaves or their value to society.”

 

“You’ll get there.” Flash handed him an engex can. “Maybe you’ll even manage to remember to believe that.”

 

“I do believe it, I think.” Starscream looked down into the can, at the dark, swirling fluid. “But Dr Rong ought to be insulted in every way that it is possible to construct a insult.”

 

On the other hand – he took a long sip of the drink. It was very cold and the carbonation was pleasant. Only diamond flavour – why couldn’t anyone get original carbon any more? On the other hand, it was true that Starscream had insulted every mech on this corridor at one point or another, feeling they fully deserved it. And, well, they had… well, some of them… they had turned out to be…

 

He drained the can, threw it at the recycler – perfect, spot-on, in the centre of the target, genius – and stood up. “Is anyone else around?”

 

“Yes, he’s in,” ‘Pactor said, looking towards Grimlock’s door and laughing. Pitiful humour, which it would be most dignified to ignore.

 

When he knocked, Grimlock called out. Inviting him in.

 

Well. Not him. The theoretical mech who had knocked. Who as far as Grimlock was concerned could have been anyone. He was just lucky that it was Starscream.

 

Not clear, yet, if he would see it that way.

 

-

 

“I want to finish,” Starscream said. He’d only briefly been into Grimlock’s room since it had been repaired. Since he’d broken it. The fossil was missing, although perhaps that was just because it had been removed to a safer location.

 

“I want to complete the project,” he tried again. Grimlock was in mech mode, painting at an easel, one spare brush waiting ready in a tiny dino hand behind his back. “I need to… Megatron can’t just _win_ ,” he added. “Which is not to say that he probably won’t win, because he’s awful that way, but if I don’t do anything at all then he really have won. In the most annoying fashion.”

 

(Rong had suggested that Megatron was not particularly interested in the course of Starscream’s semester, relative to the interest Starscream took in Megatron’s, but that was just another way that Rong was, well, wrong.)

 

“What You Starscream want to do?” Grimlock put all the brushes down. He seemed strangely tense, just as he had every time they’d been alone together recently.

 

“You, still. I mean….” Starscream vented, in and out, and started again. “I think it was a good project. And I don’t have time to sculpt and I’m not sure yet what else I’ll do but I know it could be fantastic. You’re so…” he gestured in Grimlock’s direction, frustrated. “You’re… it’s amazing, how you are.”

 

Grimlock was staring at him. Abruptly, he transformed into the dinosaur, turning his head at once to hold Starscream’s gaze.

 

“Yes,” Starscream murmured.

 

There just _weren’t_ words for that, maybe there wasn’t even art that could capture the way that shift made him feel.

 

“You Starscream wish could be alt all time? Like Me Grimlock?”

 

“My alt isn’t like yours. It never would be.” Starscream thought of the cold against his wings, and not managing to care, and shivered. “I don’t… I like it but I don’t….” He vented, starting to feel awkward and now hot, fans starting to whir. Turned away, shaking his head.

 

He didn’t want to talk to Rong, not about this. He wanted to talk to Grimlock, and he… He couldn’t… No one had ever programmed him to be able to…

 

“You Starscream OK.” Grimlock was beside him, mech mode again, and it wasn’t a question. “You fine.”

 

Grimlock’s EM field was almost painful, Starscream was so aware of it. If it had been a colour, it would have been purple, rich and deep. If it had been a sound, it would have been a gong striking, and a shimmer of bells beside it. If it had been a taste, it would have been coal flavour carbon bars, the memory of sitting side by side on Grimlock’s recharge slab eating them, laughing at cartoon dinosaurs, that EM hum spiking every now and then as their fields brushed, just.

 

“Then why won’t you be my friend any more?”

 

Grimlock drew back abruptly, as if he’d been struck. “Friends not project.”

 

“Well then, if it matters that much to you, I don’t have to…”

 

“No, You Starscream not understand.” Grimlock was still stepping backwards, retreating halfway across the room until his EM was barely discernable. “Not understand at all.”

 

Then Grimlock vented, heavy. Then he crouched and pulled a box out from underneath his recharge slab. He put in a combination and got out a small metal cube, and a datapad. They were connected by a wire.

 

“Me Grimlock wait, have translation Cybertronian. From chiro. Me Grimlock write in chiro. Journals take now, transcribe good. This,” he tapped the wires, “not best. Sounds weird. But You Starscream need to see.”

 

Trying and failing to process any sense from any of it, Starscream came over when Grimlock offered him the datapad. He pressed a hand to it, and opened the text up.

 

_Observational Analysis of Seeker Mech in Academic Setting_

_Grimlock (Beast), Cybertron Academy of Sciences_

 

Starscream looked up at him.

 

“Title fixed,” Grimlock said, not a little shakily. “Translation worse after.”

 

Starscream turned the page.

 

_In the precious periods of time and space I have shared with the seeker mechanoid known as the harsh shrill cry of the astral bodies, I have seen, witnessed, felt, a great many surprising and unexpected (I did not expect, I was alarmed, I was fascinated) feelings and sensations. He is beautiful and so awful (awe, appropriate, faster than others, entirely aware of it, arrogant, vain, those eyes) and in many ways a typical seeker model and program (see also Ratchet (Ambulance), Revolutionary Wounds in Reactionaries), but conversely (despite, because, as well, alongside) this, he is also (actually?) more than…._

 

“You’re writing about _me_?”

 

“Science Academy postgraduate placement. Me Grimlock have. First mech write chiro to get placement. Not read good, though, when…” he gestured at the datapad. “Notes, just. Was plan, translate later. And if You Starscream not want, just say. Me Grimlock will destroy all of it. Promise.”

 

“You think I’m beautiful?” Starscream looked down at the page again. Looked up. Tried to resist the urge to jump up and down a little on the spot. “This whole thing, this whole paper, is about _me_?”

 

“Book,” Grimlock said. He looked confused. “Plan book.”

 

“Book,” Starscream vented, long and low and happy. “A whole _book_.” Then, delighted, struck by the savant inspiration of rejoicing, “And I can draw you, in the act of studying me, and that can be my project and that can be your cover!”

 

He didn’t mean to reach out, because he wasn’t thinking, really. He wasn’t processing, or alerting, or planning or gaming. It was a surprise when he realised he had grabbed Grimlock’s hand. And that he could _hear_ him.

 

Not hear. Feel? Grimlock was saying that he was happy, that he was so relieved, that he was confused but…

 

Starscream stared. He was confused too, but he was happy, he wanted Grimlock to know how good it was to be relaxed like this with him, to…

 

And Grimlock did know, because they were… The EM fields were brushing up and blending and it wasn’t chiro, Grimlock was saying, that really did have words, but this was close, and you had to want it, you couldn’t just… it wasn’t like talking, you couldn’t make someone… no one could overhear, it just…

 

It didn’t matter that Starscream’s ports were feeling hot, sensitive, like they wanted touching for the first time he’d ever known. It didn’t matter that one of them had opened, except it was wonderful, and it was fine, and Grimlock understood, he felt the same, he wanted… they both wanted, they both…

 

If they interfaced, if they did that then things would be shared, known, more specifically, more deeply. Memories. Not a data dump, not just wires. Flowing. Touching. Soaring together.

 

Grimlock wanted to change – it felt better, things _tasted_ better when he was the dino, but he was afraid, he thought that Starscream didn’t want…

 

Starscream did want, though. That was the thing, he did, he did, he did.

 

Hand to hand, Grimlock touched him. With the hands that Grimlock favoured, small and perfectly formed. With Grimlock’s tail curling round them. With Grimlock’s jaw open, venting like a beast might pant, overwhelmed as Starscream felt.

 

“Teach words soon,” Grimlock said. “Soon, tell, say, us both.”

 

They rolled over together on the recharge slab.

 

Starscream’s mind went silent on one note, one pure happy tone.

 

-

 

_… and the author, Grimlock, must certainly have earned his doctoral fellowship, given the joors of work evinced in this fascinating study of the health and social challenges faced by seekers and those around them. What the work may lack in distance it makes up for in warmth, becoming at times more like a memoir. He fully acknowledges the observer effect engendered by disclosing his project to the mech who is now his cohabitee, but his first hand view of the progress of this seeker through reprogramming therapy and to his current position, in the view of this reviewer, makes up for that. The book’s preface, written by the seeker in question, in which he takes a moment to insult the three times winner of the Alpha Trion award (‘View from the Ground: Collected Poems’, by Megatron (Drill), see later review), sets the scene for a poignant and often controversial case study of the Quintesson legacy that walks – or sometimes flies – amongst us still…_

 

‘Seeking Truth: An Aerialbot’s Journey’, review in the Iacon Institute student newspaper


End file.
